Paperwork for Projects

Press, 3 August 1983, Page 13

Paperwork for Projects

“From, Given Ground Springing” — Paperwork for Projects by Pauline Rhodes at the Gingko Gallery until August 4. Reviewed by John Hurrell.

The work of Pauline Rhodes is quite well known in Christchurch now, particularly for the installations she has had over the last two or three years in the McDougall and C.S.A. galleries. These exhibitions, have been distinctive through the use of her unusual technique of deliberately incorporating rust stains as a means of making marks, as an essential ingredient either in her sculptural arrangements, or in her individual drawings. The title of this exhibition is clever because of its ambiguity. It can refer to the water springing out of the damp earth to interact with the steel plates placed over the paper outside. It can also refer to the ideas for making marks which spring into the artist’s mind as she contemplates these “given” stains as a basis for making drawings. The word “springing” is also appropriate because it suggests the tensions in the circular gestural squiggles, and the latent energy in a compressed steel spring itself. All the 32 displays in this show consist of “watercolours” of rust stains, as well as other media such as crayon and pencil. As “Paperwork for Projects,” the sheets of paper can be pinned to the wall in gridlike patterns, or drawn on to suggest plans of action for larger outdoor projects, or even simply left as the decorative remnants of a

corrosive process. In this second possibility, many of these drawings suggest an aerial view of the landscape, like a map where instead of contours, the troughs and valleys are formed by the flattened wrinkles of the once wet paper, and set amongst the mottled patterns of orangey-brown stains. As drawings, many of these paperworks are indeed beautiful. They range from small cropped works, some of which use pieces of wire to get thin calligraphic penlike stains, to larger more gutsy works containing areas of densely compacted colour. On this level, they can be considered successful, for the method is sufficiently unusual and the organisation inventive, that they retain interest formally. However, the nature of the marks from Rhodes’s own hands causes some interesting problems. Conceptually they do not extend the first process of mark making from the steel plates, and look imposed on the paper. Some of these

are gestural, their impulsiveness acting as a foil to the protracted processes embodied in the marks beneath them. Others are analytical, linear extensions of geometrical shapes suggested in the patterns themselves. In a sense, they are sophisticated doodles, fanciful toyings with the land-scape-like qualities of the actual stains. They do not actually convey hard and fast information, but rather suggest the activity of the artist’s mind as she inspects the physical traces the metal sheets have left on the paper, so she can add to it with other media. It is because these works can never convincingly articulate about specific projects in the actual landscape itself, that they fail in the hinted aspirations of thentitles. Their interest lies in the degree of control with which the stains were created, and how the second layer of “handmade marks” fit in. The variations of integration between these two processes is the central theme of this show.